Award Winners / Artist Profile

Samuel Green

About the Artist

Samuel Green (Waldron) was born in Sedro-Woolley, WA and raised in the nearby fishing and mill town of Anacortes. After four years in the military, including service in Antarctica and South Vietnam, he attended college under the Veterans Vocational Rehabilitation Program, earning degrees from Highline Community College and Western Washington University (BA and MA). A 36-year veteran as a Poet-in-the-Schools, he has taught in literally hundreds of classrooms around Washington State. He has also been a Visiting Professor at Southern Utah University, Western Wyoming Community College, Colorado College, and served nine winter terms as Distinguished Visiting Northwest Writer at Seattle University, as well as nine summers in Ireland. Poems have appeared in hundreds of journals, including Poetry, Poetry Northwest, Poet & Critic, Poetry East, Southern Poetry Review, Prairie Schooner, and Puerto del Sol. Among his ten collections of poems are Vertebrae: Poems 1972-1994 (Eastern Washington University Press) and The Grace of Necessity (Carnegie-Mellon University Press), which won the 2008 Washington State Book Award for Poetry. He has lived for 29 years off the grid on remote Waldron Island off the Washington coast in a log house he built himself after living in a tent for three years. He is, with his wife, Sally, Co-Editor of the award-winning Brooding Heron Press, which produces fine, letterpressed volumes. In December, 2007, he was named by Governor Christine Gregoire to a two-year term as the Inaugural Poet Laureate for the State of Washington. In January of 2009, he was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in Poetry, and was a member of the NEA’s poetry panel for the 2011 fellowships.

Artist's Addenda: Samuel Green's book, All That Might Be Done, is now buyable on Amazon.

Information included above was provided by artist at the time of application.